Misha paints with broad brushstrokes so if you are looking for a "deep dive" this book will not satisfy. Furthermore, there are redundancies in the waMisha paints with broad brushstrokes so if you are looking for a "deep dive" this book will not satisfy. Furthermore, there are redundancies in the way he presents things that I found a bit distracting. Despite these flaws, however, I consider this book a must read. Mishra's panoramic sweep provides illuminating insights into cultural and intellectual history. By starting with the debate between Rousseau and Voltaire over modernity, Mishra provides a useful template for understanding the present. His claim is that we have been reliving that early debate for over 200 years. While "depth over breath" has it's virtues, Mishra reminds us that breadth has an essential place in contextualizing the present....more

Ridley uses evolutionary biology and anthropology to argue that human nature is cooperative for selfish reasons. He draws a political conclusion fromRidley uses evolutionary biology and anthropology to argue that human nature is cooperative for selfish reasons. He draws a political conclusion from this, arguing that since human beings interact with a modicum of restraint they don’t need big government (Leviathan) to do it. In fact, government paternalism makes people more selfish and greedy. Ridley promotes the conservative claim that “free individuals in small communities” are all that is needed for justice, social order, and economic prosperity. Perhaps this would be true in an ideal world, but we do not live in one. We live in a world where corporations have become the new Levithans. Ridley does not consider the corrupting influence of power and how vast inequalities of power and wealth usurp democracy. Although I don’t agree with Ridley’s conclusions, the journey that takes us there is a fascinating synopsis of contemporary ideas in evolutionary biology and anthropology. Don’t let the political slant expressed in the final chapters keep you from reading this book. ...more

What follows is part review and part reading notes as I try to think through the jargon and the complex ideas.

The Sublime Object of Ideology is ZizekWhat follows is part review and part reading notes as I try to think through the jargon and the complex ideas.

The Sublime Object of Ideology is Zizek’s first book translated into English and contains the core ideas that are found in much of his latter work. His analysis of ideology draws from Marx and Althusser, but his use of Lacanian psychoanalysis draws different conclusions. For Zizek, ideology does not mask a given reality; it creates reality through unconscious processes. “Behind the curtain is the fact that the subject thinks something is behind the curtain (220).” Zizek flips Marx on his head the way Marx flipped Hegel. Marx flips Hegel by reading him through the materialist lens of political economy while Zizek reads the materialist Marx by reading him through the idealism of Lacan and

I. Background - Lacan According to Zizek, ideology operates by creating sublime objects of desire. These objects correspond to what Lacan variously designated object petite a, or in some instances, borrowing from Freud, Das Ding (The Thing).

Object petit a is the object-cause of desire. It is the thing we think we want but can never have, because it does not exist as an objective entity. It is related to the nagging sense of being unfulfilled when “something is missing” from our life. That something, object petit a, exists as a fantasy object that we chase but can never grasp. This is due to the nature of Lacanian desire, “Desire is always desire for something that is missing and thus involves a constant search for the missing object” (Homer, 87).

While Zizek does not explicitly frame ideological desire using Oedipal terms in The Sublime Object, Oedipal terms can be helpful in understanding the dynamics of object petit a. From this lens, desire is the desire for the m(O)ther. At an early stage of development we connect with a mother figure who provides a sense of wholeness and belonging. We are one with the m(O)ther, but this is transitory.

Through a process of separation the child learns that the m(O)ther is distinct from itself and will not always be there. At some point she has to remove the breast, leave the room, or be with the father. At some point the child must therefore ask, “What do I have to do to get her back?” “What does she want?” Desire is the other’s desire, or as Lacan put it, “Man desires the other’s desire for him (Fink, 59).” It is impossible for the child to know the m(O)ther’s desire except through creating a fantasy space that allows for the emergence of object petit a, and this is true of all human relations.

This fundamental lack – the absence of the m(O)ther – is representative of the “cause” part of object petit a as object-cause of desire. Later in life the child, now an adult, might find a job, spouse, revolutionary cause, consumer item, or what have you, that substitutes for this absence, for the original sense of connection and wholeness that was lost, but which can never be regained. This is the “object” part of object petite a and illustrates its retrospective dimension. We don’t know what variable person or thing will substitute for the m(O)ther until after it already has.

This is a key point: The object of desire is a substitution/representation. It substitutes for the mother and represents lack. As such, it can never satisfy the demands of desire. There is nothing beyond or behind it, there is nothing to grab hold of. We cannot return to an original state of wholeness and connection to the m(O)ther. To the extent that such as state exists, it exists in the realm of what Lacan called The Real, a slippery term that, in one of its guises, designates the part of reality that is often traumatic (like separation from the m(O)ther) and which escapes language and other systems of symbolization.

To summarize: Object petit a is both the object of desire and the cause of desire. It represents the lack that defines desire (deesire is the presence of lack). Fantasy attempts to fill that lack by providing the illusion that we have satisfied desire, the illusion that the m(O)ther / child division is unified. In Zizek’s register, fantasy is an ideological construct providing the illusion that we understand ideology and can see through it. In fact, the moment we think we have beaten ideology is the moment when ideology has beaten us.

II. Part One - The Symptom

{By analyzing the form of commodity exchange, not just the contents. Freud uses a similar methodology with dreams.} A symptomatic reading is insufficient because ideology does not mask symptoms (the way dreams do or the way traditional Marxist conceptions do)

Ideology operates in ways that are similar to how the reification of commodities operate in Marx. For Marx, the value of a commodity rests on a certain type of non-knowledge. If the social nature of commodity-value is exposed, the commodity would lose its value. Its ontological status is founded on a misrecognition of its social nature. For Zizek, the same is true of ideology. Ideology would lose its efficacy if it were exposed (14-15).

This aspect of the argument does not take us much further than Marx, but Zizek’s main point radicalizes Marx. “Ideology is not simply ‘false consciousness,’ an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as ideological.” Taken to the next step: “Ideological is not the ‘false consciousness’ of a social being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by ‘false consciousness (15).”

The last sentence carries the whiff of a tautology and muddles the issue. What is the difference between having false consciousness and being supported by it? Regardless, we can approach the meaning of this claim by returning to Zizek’s analysis of reification and commodity-value.

If everyone came to the agreement that money is an abstraction that has no inherent value, then money would have no value and we would not be able to purchase anything with it – there would be nothing to purchase. The circuit of exchange would be broken. Commodities become meaningless in a world where the means of buying and selling does not exist. Likewise, if everyone came to the agreement that Nike shoes are products of economic exploitation and do not confer special status or athleticism for the wearer, Nikes would lose their value. The “Nike world” would no longer exist. The ideological reality created by the Nike brand would disappear.

In such a scenario there would not be anything behind “Nike world” after the popping of its ideological bubble. Nike’s ideology does not conceal another world or hidden truth about Nike shoes - they make you run slower instead of faster, they make you trip instead of jump - just as there is nothing behind the abstract nature of money. On the contrary, Nike’s ideology is Nike. The value of money is its socially determined (ideological) value. Thus, as Zizek writes, “If we come to ‘know too much,’ to pierce the true functioning of social reality, this reality would dissolve itself (15).” This appears to be the obverse side of the Marxist model, where “knowing too much” (i.e. looking behind the curtain) leads to understanding reality, not the dissolution of it.

The classic Marxist understanding of ideology is therefore inaccurate. The class consciousness/false consciousness dichotomy is analogous to an inside/outside metaphor that obfuscates the true mechanisms of ideology. According to classic Marxism, ideology is a type of boundary – or curtain - that separates true from false. With Zizek, however, ideology does not conceal, it permeates. Social reality is a sponge that is infused with ideology. If you remove the water from a sponge you get a dried up, useless sponge. If you remove ideology from reality you get a “dried up,” useless reality. More accurately, you get a reality that does not exist because reality is ideological.

At this point we can see how Zizek reads Marx through the lens of Lacan. There is no inside/outside dichotomy in ideology, nothing to conceal behind the curtain, just as there is no representation behind the object of desire. Ideology constructs reality with “nothing to hide” in the same way that Object petit a creates desire and represents lack.

Zizek thus reconfigures ideology as ideological fantasy. “The fundamental level of ideology … is not that of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring social reality itself (30).”

To understand the significance of this sentence it is important to know that fantasy, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, is not diametrically opposed to reality. Zizek presents fantasy and reality as existing in a type of dialectical relationship. Although at this early part of the text Zizek does not make explicit comparisons with Hegel, and does not use the word dialectical, it appears as though this is an example of how his understanding of Hegel informs his understanding of Lacan.

For Lacan, fantasy is the “support that gives consistency to reality (44).” Fantasy is anchored in the Real and reality is always a projection of fantasy. If a father suddenly wakes up after dreaming that he unintentionally harms his son, it’s because the fantasy touches upon the Real of the father’s guilt and waking life is more bearable than an encounter with the Real (44). Fantasy is not an escape of social reality, reality is an escape from unbearable fantasy (45). “It is only in the dream that we come close to the real awakening – that is, to the Real of our desire (47).”

Zizek’s next move is to apply these insights to the sociology of anti-Semitism. When an anti-Semite encounters a Jew who does not fit the anti-Semitic stereotype, his response is not to disavow the ideologically constructed stereotype. It’s to use his everyday experience of his Jewish friend as an affirmation of the stereotype. “Jews really are deceptive, see how normal and friendly this one appears to be.”

In other words, the reality of everyday experience is not determinative in a world infused by ideological stereotypes. It is in this sense that Zizek speaks of unconscious fantasy as structuring reality. Attempting to prove that the stereotypes are false by providing counter-examples does not work. It only reinforces the stereotypes. Instead, we must prove that the “anti-Semitic idea of the Jew has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of the Jew is a way to stitch up the inconsistency of our own ideological example (49).” The ideological fantasy of the Jew indicates a lack within the ideological system that fantasy attempts to cover up. Exposing this lack is akin to encountering the traumatic Real, i.e. the inconsistency of ideology. The world falls apart when we realize the world as we know it is an ideological effect, and this can have traumatic consequences for the individual (81).

The unconscious and all-pervasive nature of ideology makes it more formidable – more difficult to understand or work through. Zizek is adamant that postmodern irony or cynicism is not the answer but part of the problem. Today, ideology does not work upon a naïve consciousness, or a false-consciousness as Marx would say. On the contrary, it works upon subjects who are well aware of ideology but act as though they don’t care, or who attempt to appropriate the ways in which it manifests itself, like my punk friend in middle school who added a U.S. Army insignia to the safety pins on his leather jacket.

Some critics contend that we live in a post-ideological world because, like my middle school friend, we have become too smart for ideology. We no longer believe in what it wants us to believe. This type of cynical, or ironic, approach to ideology would seem to subvert Marx’s claim in Capital regarding reification (which Zizek uses as a short-hand definition of ideology), “They do not know it, but they are doing it.” On the contrary, from Zizek’s perspective, “They know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know (30).”

Zizek makes an important theoretical distinction at the point. He distinguishes between the “knowing” and “doing” aspects of Marx’s phrase. Ideology no longer operates on the level of knowing, but rather operates on the level of doing. We comply with ideology when we act according to its dictates, regardless of what we know about it (27-28). Therefore, to say that we live in a post-ideological society is to fall into the trap of ideology. It assumes that ideology only operates on the level of belief and not of action as well.

Considering the all-pervasive and unconscious aspects of ideology, what can be do about it? Is it possible to free ourselves from it? Both Zizek and Lacan rely on the classic Freudian assumption that knowledge will lead to freedom, or at the very least a type of working through of trauma. In the case of ideological recognition, how do we recognize ideology as ideology and work though the trauma of that realization?

To complicate this further, me must acknowledge that for Lacan all recognition is in fact a misrecognition, thus potentially making any attempt at the critique of ideology a failed effort from the start. Zizek’s response to this, however, is to remind us that for Lacan truth will eventually arise from an initial act of misrecognition. What is transference if not a misrecognition that leads to truth (60-62)?

Zizek further develops this idea through an analysis of historical repetition in Hegel. The interpretation of the first event in a series of events is a misrecognition that is retrospectively giving meaning by subsequent events. Caesar’s assassination, for example, was interpreted by Roman society as marking the end of a tyranny, but a subsequent event, the rise of Augustus, retroactively reinterpreted this “misrecognition” as the treasonous murder of a great leader. Historical understanding thus parallels psychoanalytic discourse, where symptoms are interpreted retrospectively through the misrecognition embedded in transferential relationships.

To free ourselves from ideology we must, in Lacan’s phrase, “go through the fantasy.” We must, in other words, interpret the symptoms of fantasy in such as way that allow us to realize that our fantasy is a fantasy (80). Knowledge of fantasy qua ideology will allow us to gain distance from ideology. But what happens, as if often the case, when we gain pleasure from our symptoms? What happens when we refuse to let go of the fantasy because it brings us pleasure? At this point, Zizek does not appear to have a good answer to this question, although he does a commendable job of explaining the problem.

Lacan was well aware of the problem and coined the neologism, sinthome to describe it. Symptom qua sinthome is a symptom that provides pleasure and pain (81). It is related to the Lacanian term jouissance, often translated as enjoyment in English. Jouissance refers to the pleasure/pain of symptomatic behavior and in other contexts to the pleasure/pain of encountering the Real. For Lacan, the human psyche is like a toothache. It’s painful but we can’t but help aggravate it. Jouissance explains why patients often persist in acting out their symptoms after they have realized their root causes. It’s why the ideological fantasy is so difficult to escape – it provides jouissance.

III. Part II - Lack in the Other

Zizek begins the second part of the text by analyzing the way ideology in related to a system (or structure) of signs. He borrows significantly from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, a work that Zizek distances himself from in later works.

Before going into the specifics of that analysis it is important to remember that an ideological system is a symbolic system, a system made up of signs. Signs in themselves are “free floating.” They do not have inherent meaning, but gain meaning through their relationship with other signs that exist within the same structural network.

This is significant for the study of ideology because ideology imposes meaning on signs by connecting them together through the use of a master signifier. The key concept is another Lacanian term called the point de caption, sometimes interpreted as the quilting point or nodal point. The point de caption is the master signifier that unifies, or “quilts,” free-floating signs within an ideological system. Communism, for example, brings together various terms and imposes a particular meaning on them. Democracy, feminism, and ecologism attain a common meaning – and structural relationship – by being understood in terms of class conflict. Neoconservative capitalism, on the other hand, takes the same terms and quilts them using the concept of the free market as the point de caption, and thus ascribes different meanings to them. Democracy under communism is associated with egalitarianism while for neo-conservatives it is associated with individual competition (95-96).

The point is not to identify what true democracy really is, but to realize that there is no true democracy. Since democracy, or any contested term, means different things for different ideologies, the key to winning an ideological struggle is to impose a credible point de caption that can unify the other terms (i.e. signs). For example, to make the ecological struggle a matter of the capitalist exploitation of nature as opposed to a matter of big government imposing its power on business. The key point in all of this is that meaning is retrospective and contingent. The point de caption imposes meaning on a sign after the fact. It does not describe reality, it creates reality, après coup.

On lacan.com Rex Butler puts this in terms that clarify what is at stake. Practically speaking, once you have determined the facts that are important for your interpretation, you are already within ideology. The facts don’t come first, ideology comes first and interprets the facts for you. To illustrate the significance of this idea, Butler uses an example from the Weimar Republic that Zizek mentions in another one of his texts.

In 1930s Germany the Nazi narrative of social reality won out over the socialist-revolutionary narrative not because it was better able to account for the 'crisis' in liberal-bourgeois ideology, but because it was able to impose the idea that there was a 'crisis' - a 'crisis' of which the socialist-revolutionary narrative was itself a part and which must ultimately be explained because of the 'Jewish conspiracy' (TS, 179).

Since the master-signifier, like all signifiers, attains meaning within a structural network, there is no foundational identity or conflict that we can, or should, base a politics of emancipation. There is no ultimate meaning that it describes because it creates its own meaning. While ideology might therefore be successful in imposing a social reality on historical subjects, it fails as ontology. It is, as Zizek says, doomed to failure, and this creates room for “radical politics.”

Laclau and Moffue’s notion of a “radical politics” posits a political field where no single struggle comes first. Prioritizing a theoretical concept or a social identity like race or class would be based on the structural effect of a point de caption, not on reality itself. [It’s not that race or class don’t exist, it’s that the meaning ascribed to them, or any category, are not inherent to them] The practical consequences are not clear, but based on Zizek’s introduction to Sublime Object, radical politics leads to a politics that promotes difference, as opposed to consensus, and engages particular struggles, as opposed to global ones. Laclau and Mouffe are often labeled post-Marxists, but they essentially provide the epistemological justification for postmodern politics. ...more

Zizek reminds me of Micky Mouse in Walt Disney’s Fantasia. What Micky does with inanimate objects, Zizek does with ideas - he can conjure a menagerieZizek reminds me of Micky Mouse in Walt Disney’s Fantasia. What Micky does with inanimate objects, Zizek does with ideas - he can conjure a menagerie of theories at the flick of a wrist and make them all do his biding. This can be both intoxicating and frustrating. Is it an example of masterful synthesis or dilettantish playfulness? Like the Sorcerer’s apprentice, does Zizek lose control? A quick reading of First as Tragedy might lead one to say yes, but when Zizek’s work is taken as a whole it becomes obvious that he is someone to take seriously.

Zizek’s oeuvre provides strong and original readings of Hegel, Lacan, Marx, and even St. Paul, who is essential to the “atheistic Christianity” Zizek uses to rethink communism. First as Tragedy applies Zizek’s interpretations of these figures to the financial crash of 2008 and other events contemporaneous to it. First as Tragedy is “collateral damage”, to use Zizek’s own description of his political and cultural writings – not the core of what he does, rather an application of the philosophical investigations at the heart of his work. This makes First as Tragedy a good entry point into the world of Zizek. Bits and pieces of theory float through the text, which can later be delved into by reading the more hefty books while the cultural and historical examples keep the book grounded and relevant to the “real world.”

The first half of the book is devoted to the critique of capitalist ideology. Zizek asserts that the financial crash will, counter-intuitively, strengthen the free market. “The basic premises of the ruling ideology, far from being put into doubt, are even more violently asserted (18).” Don’t blame the capitalist system, say the capitalists, blame the scoundrels, cheats and regulators who failed to regulate. It’s not the fault of capitalism, it’s the fault of deviations of capitalism, thus a return to the basics, to a pure form of what capitalism should be. In concrete terms: bail out the banks, create a consumer protection board while maintaining “too big to fail” in order to assure the financial hegemony of the actors who created the crisis in the first place. The global financial crisis of 2008 (a crisis of capitalism) is therefore the flip-side of the era of Really Existing Socialism in eastern Europe (a crisis of socialism).

Zizek also borrows from Naomi Klein, predicting that ‘08 will initiate the “shock therapy” of more neoliberal policies to set the system right. Returning back to the basics, getting capitalism “right” will mean that those who suffered the most, will suffer more. First as Tragedy was written before austerity measures became common place in European economies – most notably in Greece and Ireland – but the recent history of economic austerity has proven Zizek right on this point. It should be noted that the U.S. has experienced its own, less dramatic version of European austerity, such as cutting the food stamp program while maintaining corporate subsidies.

At the theoretical level, Zizek dips into many different pools. An analysis of consumer society via Lacan is one of them and a critique of postmodern “self-fashioning” is another. Of particular importance is the role of ideology in maintaining liberal capitalism. Unlike the traditional Marxist view, which sees ideology as masking the true nature of economic relations, Zizek sees democratic capitalist ideology as exposing the truth of its corruption while convincing us not to do anything about it.

"Nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware of their corrupted nature, but we participate in them, we display our belief in them, because we assume that they work even if we don’t believe in them (51)."

More generally, Zizek uses ideology to refer to a process of acting “as if” everything were okay, “as if” it doesn’t matter, “as if” the presupposition that we all know is a lie, is not a lie. Two of his favorite examples are the animated children’s film Kung Fu Panda and an anecdote from the life of the physicist Niels Bohr. Kung Fu Panda is ironic towards its own spiritualism – constantly making fun of it – and yet taking it seriously at the same time. The spiritualism is “fake” and joke worthy, but the film acts as though it is not (we are aware that democracy and justice are corrupt, but we act as though they are not).

Likewise, when a visitor to Bohr’s country house expressed skepticism about the ability of the horseshoe above the door to ward off evil spirits, Bohr responded, “I don’t believe in it either, I have it because I was told it works whether you believe in it or not (50-51).” Like the good liberal who knows the system is corrupt but acts as though it’s not, Bohr doesn’t believe in the mystical power of the horseshoe, but acts as though he does – because it might. This appears to be another version of Pascal’s wager – I’m going to believe in God just in case he exists.

Another example might be the response to global warming. We know it’s there, we know it’s serious, but we act as though it’s neither there nor serious. I believe Zizek’s point is that ideology is not a matter of self-deception. It does not deceive us into believing what’s “really there” isn’t there – Bohr is not deceived into believing that horseshoes have mystical qualities. Rather, ideology compels us to “go with the flow” even though we know “the flow” is false.

Zizek’s analysis of ideology is informed by psychoanalytic concepts, in particular those of Lacan. According to Zizek, ideology operates in a fetishitic mode, as opposed to a symptomal mode. The cause of a symptom is repressed. The cause of a fetish is not; it’s out in the open, acknowledged. On the one hand, if I repress how the death of a loved one affected me, it might return as a neurotic or obsessional symptom (i.e. “the return of the repressed.”) On the other hand, I can cope with the death of a loved one by making a fetish out of an object associated with that person, such as carrying a lock of his or her hair in my pocket. For Zizek, “The fetish is the embodiment of the Lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth (65).”

This parallels the insights into ideology given above. Bohr’s horseshoe is a fetish that embodies the lie of good luck and elections are a fetish that embody the lie of democracy in a corrupt system. Fetish items are “lies” that we know are lies and which allow us to cope with reality. The fetishistic mode of ideology convinces us to act (or not act) in accordance to a lie. Simply put, the principal question one must ask when studying ideology is “What’s your fetish?” What is the thing that allows you to cope with reality? Or, in a different register, What is the thing that allows you to critique the status quo while doing nothing about it? ...more

This is a great intro to Lacan. The last few chapters are dense, but I would recommend the beginning for anyone interested in an introduction to LacanThis is a great intro to Lacan. The last few chapters are dense, but I would recommend the beginning for anyone interested in an introduction to Lacan's main ideas. The clinical examples and examples from everyday life make it accessible, and a welcome relief from other intros that heavily rely on literary and artistic examples....more

In addition to mapping out how key ideas evolved in the course of Lacan's work, this book provides ample philosophical and theoretical context (structIn addition to mapping out how key ideas evolved in the course of Lacan's work, this book provides ample philosophical and theoretical context (structuralism, Heidegger, Freud etc...) for understanding the origins and development of Lacan's thought. I found the section on how the Oedipus complex is related to desire and the formation of subjectivity to be especially illuminating. ...more

Perhaps not the best choice if you are brand new to continental philosophy or theory; but if you have a basic foundation Sheehan does a great job in sPerhaps not the best choice if you are brand new to continental philosophy or theory; but if you have a basic foundation Sheehan does a great job in showing how Zizek is in dialogue with Lacan, Kant, and Marx. He also includes useful summaries of Zizek's most important texts and suggestions for further secondary sources. ...more

The strength of this book lies in the step-by-step method the author uses to analyze philosophical justifications and counter-claims. Michael Sandel'sThe strength of this book lies in the step-by-step method the author uses to analyze philosophical justifications and counter-claims. Michael Sandel's *Justice* might have more appeal because Sandel covers similar territory with more case studies and thought experiments, but Sandel does not pick apart premises with the type of consistency of Shafer-Landau, nor does he cover topics like ethical pluralism and relativism. I found this to be an insightful entree into philosophical argumentation. The section on the relevance of the prisoner's dilemma for social contract theory was especially useful for my teaching. ...more

Boundaries is a useful resource for teaching environmental ethics. It provides specific case studies that bring abstract issues down to earth, and proBoundaries is a useful resource for teaching environmental ethics. It provides specific case studies that bring abstract issues down to earth, and provides a wide-ranging and comprehensible theoretical framework. The first couple of chapters are excellent in summarizing schools of thought. I was especially impressed with the political discussion in the second chapter. It positions environmental issues around the individualism and collectivism dichotomy that can help place contemporary environmental questions in terms relevant to traditional political philosophy. I also appreciate how the authors incorporate religious perspectives at various points throughout the book. This is a much-needed corrective to the short shrift that religious views often receive from the academic political left.

Not all of the chapters are as good as others – some of them spend more time on public policy than philosophy, but there is enough philosophical context in the other chapters that the relationship between the two can be teased out by students and the instructor. Each chapter begins with a dialogue and then moves to an analysis of the positions contained therein. The dialogues are not literary masterpieces and at times I found myself skipping them to get straight to the analysis, but they could be pedagogically effective in the classroom. ...more

In The Social Animal, Brooks provides a survey of contemporary developments in the sciences of the mind. He attempts to use those developments to promIn The Social Animal, Brooks provides a survey of contemporary developments in the sciences of the mind. He attempts to use those developments to promote his brand of moderate conservativism. The book is far from perfect. The survey is so broad he does not go into any depth. The political aspect, which for me is the most interesting, does not get the attention it deserves, and the narrative device – following the lives of two fictional characters – is not particularly engaging.

However, the book does not deserve the type of castigation it has received in some quarters, such as Gary Greenberg’s review essay in The Nation where he calls the book, “a deep and public embarrassment (May 18, 2011).” Despite its flaws, The Social Animal opens the doors to deeper conversations about the sciences of mind and the relationship between ideas and politics. No, it is not a political treatise nor a specialized scientific study. It is what it is – a quick survey written for a general audience, written in a style that is annoying and sentimental. And that’s okay, because ideas matter, even the annoying ones.

I. Enlightenment Philosophy

One of the more interesting aspects of The Social Animal is the philosophical connection that Brooks makes between Enlightenment philosophy and contemporary attitudes in politics and society. He promotes a view of human beings that coincides with that of the British and Scottish Enlightenment - Burke, Smith, and Hume - and is highly critical of the rationalist legacy of the French Enlightenment - Descartes, Condorcet, Voltaire.

[This breakdown of intellectual history is instructive, but much too simple. What about John Locke? He was a figure of the British Enlightenment and he believed in individualism as much as the French, one could argue that the French got their individualism from Locke. And what about French reactionaries such as de Bonald and de Maistre? They demonstrate that a sociological conception of human beings was not just something that came of out Scotland and not necessarily benign.]

The rationalist tradition of the French Enlightenment viewed human beings as fundamentally rational and individual, whereas the British Enlightenment viewed human beings as fundamentally emotional and social. Brooks follows the latter tradition in claiming that we are “social animals” – thus explaining the title of his book and the preponderance of evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics that is found in it, and which purportedly affirm the British perspective.

“The research being done today reminds us of the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections, over individual choice, character over IQ … organic systems over mechanistic ones … If you want to put the implications in simple terms, the French Enlightenment which emphasized reason, loses; the British Enlightenment, which emphasized sentiments, wins (xiii).”

II. Adam Smith

At first it seems surprising that Brooks includes Adam Smith in a group of individuals who believe in sentiments and social connectedness. What could be less sentimental than a competitive market? This confusion can be clarified by remembering that there are two Smiths – the one of The Wealth of Nations and the one of the Theory of Moral Sentiments. It is the latter that Brooks is speaking of, though some scholars argue that both books are not that far apart.

In Moral Sentiments, Smith claims that morality develops because of “sentiments”, i.e. empathy, instead of rational calculation. He further claims that we gain a sense of who we are through our empathetic feelings for others. In other words, the bedrock of any community, including the truck and barter of the market place, is found in the ways that we develop emotional connections with other people. While the emphasis is different, these ideas are not entirely foreign to The Wealth of Nations.

According to Smith, the wealth of a nation is more than a matter of free markets; it is a matter of free markets operating within national boundaries. A nation will only become rich if money is invested in domestic trade, even if foreign trade might bring a larger immediate profit to the private sector. But why would any savvy Englishman trade with a manufacturer in Manchester, when one in Brittany pays more? Because he is English. Because patriotism, a moral sentiment, outweighs the gratification of immediate profit - a notion completely foreign in this age of globalization and multi-national corporations. In the long term, domestic free trade would theoretically create a wealthy nation, thus benefiting everyone, including the businessman who initially placed his national sentiments over his pecuniary calculations.

On another level, The Wealth of Nations is compatible with Moral Sentiments because Smith distinguished between enlightened self-interest and selfishness. In the former, looking after your self-interest helps the person with whom you have an economic relationship, in the latter it does not. Morality underlies the market. The self-interested baker looks after himself and his customer by providing bread, whereas the selfish baker would cheat his customer to gain an unfair advantage. While Smith does not articulate this conceptual difference in a rigorous way, the connection between the free-market (self-interest) and moral sentiments (community) is found in empathy. It’s not just the law that prevents me from cheating you; it’s my connectedness to a moral community.

Today, this seems like a quaint notion. If Marx’s error was being unable to foresee that the working class would become consumers, thus forestalling revolution, Smith’s error was being unable to foresee how modern corporate capitalism would erode moral sentiments.

It is the communitarian aspect of the British Enlightenment that Brooks – and other conservative intellectuals - finds so compelling. Smith speaks the language of community and empathy and Edmund Burke speaks the language of custom and organic development. Social change must therefore be slow and respect tradition, unlike the revolutionary rhetoric fueled by French rationality and individualism.

From the British (conservative) perspective, the ideas of the French Enlightenment have several negative consequences. By emphasizing rationality and empiricism, the French ignored social relationships to the detriment of humane policies and sound judgment. Politics became political terror justified by reason, as witnessed in Robespierre’s appropriation of Rousseau during the Reign of Terror -- “forced to be free” became “off with their heads.” Furthermore, in a world of hyper rationality science devolved into scientism, the application of science to areas where it does not apply and the belief that the scientific viewpoint is superior to all others.

III. The Business Example

Brooks caricatures the latter mindset by portraying a fictional corporation run by a management team of braggart MBAs. They are some of the smartest people in the country and graduated from the top Ivy League schools. They speak in jargon, they study charts and graphs, they crunch numbers, and yet they are incapable of keeping their company from imploding. They don’t realize their problem isn’t one of applying the right analytical model; it’s not knowing customer needs and having a pernicious company culture. It’s a “sentimental” problem, in the sense used by Smith. This corporate example is illustrative, but a politically more significant example is the Vietnam war.

IV. The Vietnam Example

Vietnam was the liberal’s war. In particular, it was the war of a liberal ruling class intoxicated with hyper-rationality. As the journalist David Halberstram wrote, it was the well intentioned “best and the brightest” who got us into Vietnam. It was men like Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy who sat before the president with pointers and detailed maps. Just like the corporate leaders described by Brooks, they crunched numbers, spoke in jargon, and employed the latest analytical models developed by the best minds of the time. And they lost. They did not realize that winning the war (presuming that it could be won) was not solely a matter of logistics, death counts, or the amount of explosive force expended in bombing raids. It was a matter of assessing their own strengths and weaknesses, along with those of the enemy, free of ideological binders that have nothing to do with rational analysis, but have a lot to do with understanding the role of community, social relations, and tradition. The United Sates didn’t lose because it used the wrong analytical model. To simplify, it lost because its intellectual hubris prevented it from empathizing with the Viet Cong.

This is to say that human beings are more about the British Enlightenment - cultural connections and feelings - than about the French Enlightenment – the intellect and the individual. For Brooks, social and military policies that don’t take this into consideration are bound to fail.

V. The Problem with American Conservatives

Brooks believes that both American liberals and conservatives are guilty of following the individualism of the French Enlightenment. Contemporary conservatives emphasize the individualism of the market. They fight to keep government – the “nanny state” - as far away from consumer choice and freedom as possible. Thus, low taxes, proposals to privatize social security and health care, voucher programs for education etc… In other words, they like the Adam Smith of the Wealth of Nations, but ignore the social responsibility of his Moral Sentiments.

While this tradition of American politics brought good things, it also led to disastrous policies, especially when combined with hubristic rationalism. For example, Walmart, during a period of economic deregulation, was allowed to build megastores while destroying small local business and the type of close-knit moral communities favored by Smith. Similarly, American economic conservatives did the same thing in Russia after the fall of communism, pushing privatization on a society that was not ready for it and disregarding existing communal ties and norms in the process. Even the mistakes of Vietnam were repeated in Iraq, where nation-building was seen as an intellectual exercise instead of moral exercise of building trust.

VI. The Problem with American Liberals

Liberals, on the other hand, support an individualism of the moral sphere. Like conservatives, they are guilty of favoring individual freedom over social responsibility, but instead of economic freedom they are more concerned with social freedom. Thus, support for a woman’s right to choose, a strict separation of church and state, support for euthanasia, civil rights etc… For Brooks, this emphasis led to important things and created a powerful political movement. But it also created what he considers disastrous policies like welfare programs that discouraged work and disrupted the nuclear family, or housing projects that destroyed the social bonds of old communities and created ghettos “unfit for human habitation.”

VII. The Brooks Solution – Society, Modesty, and Alexander Hamilton

To rectify this surfeit of individualism, Brooks proposes three solutions. They are not policy solutions, but rather philosophical repositionings. According to Brooks, we must realize that individual freedom – whether of the conservative or liberal variety - is not the goal of politics. The goal of politics is to create institutions that promote a “socio-centric” morality and virtuous decision-making by citizens. Putting money into poor neighborhoods won’t promote social mobility, if a culture of hard work and self-control has not been developed, and lowering taxes won’t help the economy if people don’t trust companies enough to invest in them (320).

Brooks quotes Patrick Daniel Moynihan is this regard:

“The central conservative truth is that is it culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself (322).”

To bring us back to where we started, the emphasis on culture and community is a return to the British Enlightenment. Brooks also wants to steer us away from the rationalistic legacy of France by promoting what he call epistemological modesty. This is the idea that, like Socrates, we know that we don’t know. Unlike Robert McNamara or the hubristic Wall Street executives of the early 2010s, we would realize that reality is too complicated to completely master and we would therefore be less likely to impose our rationalistic systems on other people or apply them to our own society in detrimental ways. It does not mean that we don’t act. It means that we act slowly and patiently, with the type of wisdom the Greeks called metis, the wisdom that comes from a combination of intuition and knowledge – or, to belabor the point, combining the best from the British and French Enlightenment traditions.

Lastly, we need to be more like Alexander Hamilton and others of the Federalist/Whig tradition, like Lincoln and T. Roosevelt. Hamilton seems to be the American who Brooks thinks was the most like Adam Smith. Hamilton’s promotion of manufacturing, capital markets, and a nationalized economy are examples of the kind of “limited but energetic” government that moderate conservatives can get behind. From this perspective, the role of government is to promote personal development and social mobility – and that’s it. In Hamilton’s words, the way to do this is by “making the chances of competition even, not abolishing them (Brooks 334).” By limiting the role of government while also giving it an appropriate role we can put our epistemological modesty to work and protect ourselves from the hubristic rationalism of the liberal nanny state and promote the social ties that the conservative market has destroyed.

Pinker argues against the social and linguistic constructionism that has grounded practically everything I've studied. In lieu of the sociological andPinker argues against the social and linguistic constructionism that has grounded practically everything I've studied. In lieu of the sociological and linguistic paradigms, Pinker posits that evolutionary biology and psychology are more accurate means of understanding human behavior. My beef is that he paints his opposition too broadly and at times makes caricatures of the sociological position. Check out Louis Menand's review in the 11/25/02 New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002......more